Sweeney, Phil, "The Man Who Always Knew the Score," in The Independent (London), 27 September 1999.

* * *

Michel Legrand's ability to write melodic themes that could be successfully marketed beyond the films for which they were written made him a popular favorite of studios seeking "hit" songs. Although Legrand was in demand for contemporary subjects, he also began in the early 1970s to score lyrical period works. While many of his works showed a facility with jazz, the period pieces also demonstrated a background in a variety of musical styles.

Legrand scored a number of French films, including works by Jean-Luc Godard beginning in the mid-1950s, but he gained international attention with his scores for the ambitious homages to Hollywood musicals created by Jacques Demy. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort provided Legrand with an opportunity to write extended scores based on recurring themes and showed his ability to create memorable light popular tunes. Although his association with Demy continued on subsequent films, they have not been on the same grand scale.

Legrand's score for The Thomas Crown Affair began an association with the lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman, with whom the composer collaborated on a number of projects ranging from Wuthering Heights to more recent films such as Best Friends and the song score for Yentl. The use of a central theme song has at times led to a tendency toward monothematic scoring with the results being more redundancy than variation. Somewhat more varied have been the composer's scores for period works such as The Three Musketeers in which Legrand has been able to apply his light flowing melodic approach to a greater variety of styles.

Legrand's song writing skills have at times led to his being selected for projects for which his style is not wholly suited. Despite his background in jazz, his overly romantic approach did not always mesh well with the songs in the Billie Holiday biography, Lady Sings the Blues, particularly when the score swells lushly during a heroin-shooting scene. The 1960s-style Latin beat provided for scenes in Never Say Never Again may have been appropriate on some level to the nostalgic feeling the character of James Bond creates, but it did little to enhance the dramatic action of the film.

Legrand continues to be as prolific as ever. In 1989 he directed Five Days in June, an autobiographical story of the teenaged Legrand's love affair with a woman twice his age. He composed the music for, and acted in the film The Young Girls Turn 25. In 1994, Legrand provided the score for Ready to Wear, a movie exposing what goes on behind the scenes at the Paris fashion shows. Since then, he has composed music for several other films: Les Misérables, Les Enfants de lumière, and Le Monde est un grand chien.

With the move toward more and more contemporary sounds in films as an attempt to keep up with changing musical styles, Legrand's own brand of pop music, once very much in vogue, now seems somewhat outdated. Not surprisingly his most successful work of late has been for noncontemporary subjects which require a more gentle lyricism. As with many of his contemporaries who were in demand in the 1960s and early 1970s, Legrand has found it necessary to modify his approach, and ironically the move has been back toward the more traditional symphonic style for which artists such as himself were originally intended as an alternative. As the twentieth century became the twenty-first, Legrand was devoting most of his professional efforts to writing music for the stage and did very little composing for films.

—Richard R. Ness, updated by
Justin Gustainis

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Legrand, Michel

Legrand, Michel (bParis, 1932). Fr. composer and conductor. Soon became known as brilliant orchestrator of light mus. and jazz. Cond. for Maurice Chevalier in Paris and NY 1954–5. Gained reputation with music for Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964). Comp. many film scores, among them Un Homme et Une Femme (1961), The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Summer of 42 (1971), and The Go-Between (1971).

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